Nobel laureate Chen Ning Yang and Turing Award-winning computer scientist Andrew Chi-Chih Yao have given up their foreign citizenships and become Chinese citizens, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced on Tuesday.

The two scientists were hired as foreign academicians of the CAS and have become full academicians, which is the first time in the history of the academy. Yang works for the Division of Mathematics and Physics and Yao works for the Division of Information Technical Sciences.

Yang was born in the city of Hefei in east China's Anhui province in 1922. He went to the United States in 1946 for his doctor's degree and became a U.S. citizen in 1964. The physicist received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics with Tsung-dao Lee for their work on parity non-conservation of weak interaction.

Born in Shanghai in 1946, Yao is a computer scientist and computational theorist. In 2000, Yao received the most prestigious award in computer science, the Turing Award, "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity."

The Chinese Academy of Sciences now has 754 academicians including 78 foreign academicians.